Christopher Whiteside MBE is the Conservative County Councillor for the Egremont North & St Bees Division of Cumbria County Council. The division includes St Bees, Bigrigg, Wood End, most of Moor Row, the Western part of the Mirehouse area of Whitehaven, and surrounding countryside.
Chris lives and works in Copeland with his wife and family.
Chris is a former member of Copeland Borough council, and an Honorary Alderman of the City and District of St Albans.

Friday, January 06, 2017

Labour begs voters to ignore the fact that their leader's policies would wreck Copeland's economy

If it were not a matter as serious as the alternative Prime Minister, in line to be offered to the electorate by Britain's principal opposition party, supporting policies which would

The local Labour party in Copeland have noticed that they are going into a by-election, which is likely to be close, with a party leader who wants to close down the industry which employs a quarter of the local working population.

Counting the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant, other nuclear facilities such as the Low Level Waste repository at Drigg, and their supply chains, it is usually estimated that something over 16,000 people are employed in the civil nuclear industry in West Cumbria, most of them in Copeland though there are some in the Workington and Barrow-in-Furness constituencies.

And there are also a number of people in the constituency, mostly at the southern end in the Millom area, employed at BAE Barrow on the Trident and successor nuclear submarine programmes.

So Jeremy Corbyn's anti-nuclear policies would devastate the economy of Copeland.

Quick on the uptake, aren't they? Of course, the fact that we have just put 25,000 newspapers round the constituency with

"Labour puts Sellafield jobs at risk"

in inch high letters on the front page might just have given them a clue.

As I am quoted in the relevant article in that newspaper I have been receiving complaints, some of them too ridiculous to deserve a response, from furious Labour councillors. They would be better advised to direct their efforts at persuading their leader to change his position.

The idea being pushed by Labour campaigners in Copeland, that you can elect a Prime Minister who is personally against nuclear power, without it having a negative impact on the nuclear industry, is straight out of cloud-cuckoo-land.

Alex Massie wrote today that Labour is ludicrous but but it's no laughing matter," and Labour's preposterous contortions in Copeland, desperately proclaiming the party to be pro-nuclear when they have an anti-nuclear leader, are a classic example of what he was writing about.